Analysis: Brain Snacks

Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge

Do you know someone named "Dylan"? Chances are he was probably named (indirectly) after Dylan Thomas! Thomas's father named him after a Celtic sea god, and when the younger Thomas became famous, "Dylan" became a popular name in Britain and the U.S. (Source)

In 1940, Dylan Thomas published a semi-autobiographical collection of short stories titled Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog – the title, of course, is a parody of James Joyce's modernist classic Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (Source)

When Dylan Thomas was four years old, he was already able to recite poetry by Shakespeare. (Source)

Dylan Thomas was a colorful character; his boorish, drunken behavior and self-destructive ways were legendary. For example, some sources claim that, while driving drunk on his way to meet Charlie Chaplin, he crashed his car into Chaplin's tennis court. It's hard to sort out fact from fiction, but if he were alive today, he'd be tabloid material right up there with Tom Cruise, Paris Hilton, and Britney Spears. (Source)

A good reason you should always "enter to win": Dylan Thomas became famous after winning a poetry contest in a newspaper in 1933. (Source)